Tài liệu Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business MANAGING DILEMMAS IN THE 21ST CENTURY pdf

Toward a New Literacy of
Cooperation in Business
MANAGING DILEMMAS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Institute for the Future
Technology Horizons Program
June 2004 | SR-851 A
Institute for the Future
2744 Sand Hill Road
Menlo Park, CA 94025
650.854.6322 | www.iftf.org
Toward a New Literacy of
Cooperation in Business
MANAGING DILEMMAS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Institute for the Future
Institute for the Future
Technology Horizons Program
June 2004 | SR-851 A
About the …
Technology Horizons Program
The Technology Horizons Program provides a comprehensive forecast that looks beyond any
single technology to analyze what happens at the intersections of biotech, information technol-
ogy, material science, and energy. We identify and evaluate discontinuities that are likely to
have major impacts on businesses over the next three to ten years.
Institute for the Future
The Institute for the Future is an independent, non-profit strategic research group with 35 years
of forecasting experience. The foundation of our business is identifying emerging trends and
discontinuities that will transform the global marketplace and providing our members with
insights into business strategy, design processes, and new business development. Our research
generates the foresight needed to create insights about the future business environment that will
lead to action. The results are customized winning strategies and successful new businesses.

Our primary research areas are consumers, technology, health and health care, and the work-
place. The Institute for the Future is based in Menlo Park, California.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Authors: Andrea Saveri, Howard Rheingold, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang,
and Kathi Vian
Peer reviewers: Rod Falcon, Marina Gorbis, and Lyn Jeffery
Editor: Maureen Davis
Art direction and design: Jean Hagan
Production and
graphic design: Robin Bogott and Karin Lubeck
© 2004 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. Reproduction is prohibited without written permission.
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1. Cooperation: A Map to Think With . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. The Research To Date: Seven Lenses on Cooperation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3. Organizational Choices: Seven Ways to Tune Up for Cooperation . . . . . . . . . . 31
4. What to Expect: Opportunities and Disruptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Appendix: Basic Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
1
In the last two decades, however, we’ve seen a vari-
ety of challenges to business models that stress com-
petition over customers, resources, and ideas.
• Companies in emerging high-tech industries
have learned that working with competitors
can build markets and help avoid costly
standards wars.
• The open source movement has shown that
world-class software can be built without
corporate oversight or market incentives.

• Google and Amazon have built fortunes by
drawing on—and even improving—the
Internet.
• Outsourcing has turned competitors into com-
mon customers of design firms and contract
manufacturers.
The value of competition-oriented strategies will fur-
ther decline as emerging technologies and new media
diffuse from high-tech into traditional industries and
as global industries become more fluid and flexible.
Connective and pervasive technologies are enabling
new forms of human and machine interactions and
relationships; they will present business institutions
with a host of new possibilities for organizing peo-
ple, processes, relationships and knowledge. These
forces will accelerate a shift in business strategy
from solving concrete business problems to manag-
ing complex business dilemmas, which in turn will
require a broader set of strategic tools and concepts
than are provided by competitive models.
Cooperation Studies:
Two Key Business Questions
Responding intelligently to this new world will
require a much more sophisticated understanding of
cooperation and cooperative strategy—as well as the
basic dilemmas that tend to trigger competitive and
cooperative behavior.
This understanding—and a host of examples of how
to manage these dilemmas—is now being forged
from important new work in mathematics, biology,

sociology, technology, law and economics, psychol-
ogy, and political science. Recent connections across
these disciplines suggest a convergence around coop-
eration and collective action as deep principles of
evolution, innovation, computation, and markets.
In this report, Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation
in Business: Managing Dilemmas in the 21st
Century, we take the first steps in exploring this
emerging field of knowledge and practice, looking
for ways to think about two key business questions.
• How can new insights about the dynamics of
cooperation help us identify new and lucrative
models for organizing production and wealth
creation that leverage win–win dynamics?
• How can organizations enhance their
creativity and grow potential innovation
with cooperation-based strategic models?
Cooperative Strategy:
The Business Challege
Traditional business strategy is organized around competition––win–lose models fueled by SWOT
analyses, market share frameworks, hard measurement, and protection of quantifiable private assets.
In mature industries, cooperation is confined to supporting industry associations, which focus on issues
of common concerns such as tax rules, and professional bodies, which set common technical standards.
Introduction
2
Cooperative Strategy: The Business Challenge
To answer these questions, we begin by mapping the
key disciplines and what they have to say about
cooperation and collective action. We look at coop-
eration through the lenses of these disciplines, and

then look across disciplines to identify seven key
“levers” that can be used to “tune” organizations for
cooperation and collective action. Finally, we exam-
ine business opportunities—and potentially disrup-
tive innovations—in five arenas that traditionally
pose dilemmas of competition versus cooperation.
• Knowledge-generating collectives
• Adaptive resource management
• Collective readiness and response
• Sustainable business organisms
• Peer-to-peer politics
This report is just a beginning, however. It’s where
we start to learn about a vast and newly emerging
territory. Our research will continue in a separate
project, and we invite you to join us in our ongoing
inquiry. For details, contact Andrea Saveri at

INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE
Introduction
3
Social Dilemmas:
The Problem of the One and the Many
Peter Kollock, author of Social Dilemmas: The
Anatomy of Cooperation, explains that,
Social dilemmas are situations in which
individual rationality leads to collective irra-
tionality. That is, individual rational behavior
leads to a situation in which everyone is
worse off than they might have been
otherwise.

One example of a social dilemma is the so-called
“tragedy of the commons,” described by Garrett
Hardin in 1968. Hardin argued that a grazing com-
mons would inevitably be overgrazed or cordoned
off as farmers pursued their own individual self-
interest by allowing their cows to graze, ultimately
reducing the benefit to everyone. Most natural-
resource management problems pose this kind of
dilemma. So do problems of knowledge sharing and
creation in science, of innovation diffusion in mar-
kets, and of global economic policy. Many games
have been built around such dilemmas—some
designed specifically to explore the implications of
cooperative versus competitive strategy.
Hardin’s analysis was based on one such game,
called the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which was developed
at the RAND Corporation in 1950. In the simplest
form of the game, two prisoners have the chance to
avoid serving time by “ratting out” their fellow pris-
oner. If neither confesses, they both get token con-
victions and serve a short sentence. But if only one
confesses, he or she gets off with no time and the
other serves a long sentence. If both confess, they
both serve a long sentence. In this dilemma, they are
both somewhat better off if they cooperate with one
another and don’t confess; however, one is a lot bet-
ter off if he or she alone confesses and the other one
does not.
This game has become the foundation for thousands
of studies across fields as diverse as mathematics and

sociology, biology, and economics. The good news
from these studies—as well as empirical studies of
real-world social dilemmas—is that there are ways to
manage these dilemmas to foster cooperative behav-
iors that produce outcomes in which everyone is bet-
ter off. Indeed, most social institutions have evolved
over time to manage one or more social dilemmas in
order to maximize benefits for all.
Cooperation: A Map to Think With
Cooperation is one partner in a pair of strategic choices; its constant companion is competition.
The two go hand-in-hand, posing a choice at every juncture, a choice that arises because of a basic
dilemma—traditionally framed as a social dilemma.
1
4
Cooperation: A Map to Think With
Lenses and Levers:
A Map of the Disciplines
Our starting point for this work is to map the various
ways that disciplines have looked at the core prob-
lem of social dilemmas. We have created a map to
serve as a thinking tool in understanding social
dilemmas, cooperative behaviors, and ultimately (we
hope) strategies of cooperation (see Figure 1).
At the center of the map is the social dilemma, sur-
rounded by seven lenses that use key concepts from
the various disciplines to understand the process of
cooperation. These concepts—synchrony, symbiosis,
group selection, catalysis, commons, collective
action, and collective intelligence—all describe a set
of dynamics that can be tuned to foster cooperative

behavior.
Arrayed around these core concepts are many more
related concepts that suggest ways to alter the
dynamics of cooperation. We have plotted them in
seven bands that represent what we think are key
levers for adjusting cooperative behavior: structure,
rules, resources, thresholds, feedback, memory,
and identity.
Together, the lenses and the levers provide a multi-
disciplinary framework for thinking about coopera-
tion and cooperative strategies. They offer both an
overview of the key studies to date and a palette of
choices for tuning cooperative systems—a scaffold-
ing for imagining new solutions to social dilemmas.
We must be cautious, however, in applying this tool.
The field of cooperative studies is young, and this
map represents only the most summary view of it.
Also, in any attempt to apply scientific knowledge to
human behavior, we must understand that there are
no recipes or algorithms when it comes to specific
groups of people, even though ample research shows
predictable patterns among groups of people in gen-
eral. A lens is something you see through; it’s a tool
for understanding, not a tool for engineering. With
this in mind, we present the map as a way to reex-
amine basic business situations and think about the
cooperative potential of groups in new ways.
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE
1
5

KEY STRATEGIC CHOICES
The literature of cooperation suggests a number
of key choices that groups can make to either
enhance or limit cooperative behavior. We some-
times represent these as four-square diagrams or
statements.
PRINCIPLES
Already emerging from this work are several key
principles. While we caution against using them
as part of an engineering formula, we offer them
here as pointers to what we hope will eventually
become a set of best practices.
THE MUST-READ AUTHORS
Many, many people are doing important research
and writing on the subject of cooperation today.
The map lists those that provide the fastest entry
into the field.
Source: Institute for the Future
1
Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business
Cooperation: A Map to Think With
Figure 1
Cooperative Strategy: An Interdisciplinary Map
THE CORE PROBLEM
The core problem that cooperative strategies seek
to resolve is the so-called social dilemma: a situa-
tion in which individual rational behavior pro-
duces poor group outcomes.
THE LENSES ON COOPERATION
Cooperation looks slightly different when

viewed from the perspective of different
disciplines, each of which offers a key con-
cept that reveals distinct insights into coop-
eration and collective action. These
concepts provide a basic set of seven
lenses on cooperation.
THE LEVERS OF COOPERATION
Strategy is ultimately about behavioral
dynamics, and the findings of cooperation
studies to date suggest many ways in which
cooperative behavior can be tuned. These
findings, clustered together, present seven
basic levers for tuning cooperation.
DURABILITY
OF
INTERACTIONS
• Info re: others
• Frequency
• Identifiability
REED'S LAW
THE ORDER PARAMETER
POWER LAW
Identity is the memory
of past structures
Groups collaborate to
help erase parts of members'
past no longer wanted
Identification
with beliefs
Individuals

as exception
handlers
Privacy vs. transparency:
importance of observable
and measurable traits
• Gossip
• Currency
• Banking
• Capitalism
Prisoners are only
prisoners if they think
of themselves as
prisoners
Evaporation &
reinforcement
Follow simple rules
Autobiographical
memory
vs.
Published
knowledge
Strategies
of affect
Autonomous
human
purpose?
• High trust >
cooperation
• Low trust >
monitoring

• Free-riders
• Rate-makers
Moderation &
meta-moderation
• Persistent vs. malleable
• Single vs. multiple
BAYESIAN GAMES
• Ad hoc networks
• Auctions
• Social learning
• Web search
• Voting
5 PRINCIPLES OF
SWARMING INTELLIGENCE
• Proximity
• Quality
• Diverse response
• Stability
• Adaptability
SMART
MOBS
7 DESIGN PRINCIPLES
• Clear boundaries
• Rules match local needs
• Ruled change rules
• Mutual monitoring
• Graduated sanctions
• Low-cost conflict resolution
• Governance layers
• Be nice

• Retaliate
• Forgive
• Be clear
TIT FOR TAT
COMMON-
POOL
RESOURCES
• Science
• Water
• Air
P2P
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Andrew Schmookler
David Sloan Wilson
John Stewart
Howard Rheingold
Steven Johnson
Andy Clark
David Reed

Robert Axelrod
Dahlem Workshop
Robert Wright
Herbert Gintis
Yokai Benkler
Lawrence Lessig
Garrett Hardin
Elinor Ostrom
Peter Kollock
Mancur Olson
Steven Strogatz
Duncan Watts
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
Eric Bonabeau
Bernardo Huberman
Kevin Kelly
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• Property regimes
Local Global
C
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C
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ate

Rivalrous Non-rivalrous
Private
Good
Toll
Good
Common-
pool
Resource
Public
Good
Non-excudabe Excludable
Centralized Distributed
Open Closed
GAME THEORY
Prisoner’s
Dilemma
Chicken
Assurance
Stag
SCALE-FREE
NETWORKS
SMALL-
WORLD
NETWORKS
Clustered
groups
connected
by a few
long links

A few well-
connected
+ many poorly
connected
nodes
Open Source
Open
Spectrum
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GROUP
SELECTION
SYNCHRONY
COMMONS
COLLECTIVE
INTELLIGENCE
COLLECTIVE
ACTION
SYMBIOSIS
CATALYSIS
SOCIAL
DILEMMA
SOCIAL
DILEMMA
• Autonomous
self-sufficient actors
• Immune
system
• Self-tuning
• Self as
ecology
• Landscape
search
• Frequency
pulling

• Pheromone
trails
• Bacterial
quorum
sensing
• Neural
synchronization
• Trust hormone:
oxytocin
• Cellular
starvation
• Cascading
• Tipping
point
• Phase
transition
• Similarity
threshold
• Self-organized
criticality
• Incomplete
information
• Coupled
oscillators
• Forgiveness
• Phenotypic
& genotypic
adaptation
• Punctuated
equilibrium

• Shadow of
the future
• Pre-adaption
• Secular
utility
• Speciates
• Parasitic
& mutualistic
relationships
• Social
algorithms
• Presence
management
• Digital
archives
• Bandwidth
• Non-zero-sum
games
• Group-
forming
networks
• Connectivity
• System architectures
• Peer production
networks
• Networked
economies
• Content
sharing &
co-creation

• Reputation
systems
• Identity
management
• Social accounting
• Organizational
mapping
• Localness
• Taxation
• Privatization
• Global trade rules
• Coordination
costs & benefits
• Voting &
consensus
mechanisms
• Social
monitoring
• Accountability
• Negotiated
loyalty
• Studied
trust
• Sanctioning
• Specialization &
division of labor
• Group
size
• Swarms
• Particle swarm

optimization
• Contact
language
• Affective
forecasting
• Experience
credit
• Emotions
• Group
identity
• Simulation
• Teleonomy
• Organismic
groups
• Multilevel
selection
• Artificial
life
• Knowledge
collectives
• Intergroup
contention
• Institutions for
collective action
• Rational
self-interested
actors
• Social
filtering
• Social-

value
orientation
• Cyborg
• Cognitively
cooperating devices
• Technical
standards
• Agent-based
systems
• Horizontal
& vertical
channels
• Hard vs. soft
boundaries
• Morals &
religions
• Faith
• Storytelling
• Music
• Payoff
structures
GROUP
SELECTION
SYNCHRONY
COMMONS
COLLECTIVE
INTELLIGENCE
COLLECTIVE
ACTION
SYMBIOSIS

CATALYSIS
SOCIAL
DILEMMA
SOCIAL
DILEMMA
7
When researchers look at a topic from the perspec-
tive of their disciplines, invariably one or two key
disciplinary concepts rise to the surface and help
frame the investigation. In looking across the
research on cooperation, we have tried to find these
key concepts, to use them as lenses for seeing coop-
eration as a biologist, a mathematician, or a sociolo-
gist would, for example. The result is a set of seven
lenses that we think provide particularly compelling
views of the problem of social dilemmas.
In this chapter, we look at cooperation through each
of these lenses, pointing to some of the fundamental
ideas emerging from the diverse disciplines engaged
in this inquiry. For each lens we identify opportunity
areas for creating cooperative business strategy. This
is by no means a comprehensive or final summary of
ideas. Rather, it is a first pass at parsing out key ideas
to track and further develop our understanding of
cooperation and collective action.
The Research to Date:
Seven Lenses on Cooperation
In the last decade, scientists and social thinkers in a range of fields have independently discovered
cooperation at the heart of a number of important phenomena. Evolutionary biologists, for example,
have revealed how symbiosis plays a key role in everything from cellular evolution to speciation and

ecosystem complexity. Mathematicians are revealing basic patterns that underlie synchrony and
swarming at all levels of nature, informing our understanding of how cooperative actions and institu-
tions can emerge from distributed actors. Sociologists have revisited the “tragedy of the commons,”
illustrating how various commons have been transformed into successful cooperative ventures in dif-
ferent industries and environments.
2
• Synchrony
• Symbiosis
• Group selection
• Catalysis
• Commons
• Collective action
• Collective
intelligence
LENSES
8
In the search for universal principles of cooperation,
mathematics has begun to contribute new concepts
for understanding how humans become linked
together in patterns that might be thought of as
“emergent cooperation.” Central among these is the
concept of synchrony: the tendency for phenomena
at all levels of existence to synchronize their rhyth-
mic behavior under certain conditions. Markets,
smart mobs, social networks, and traffic patterns are
all informed by the mathematics of synchrony; so
are many natural (and sometimes destructive phe-
nomena), such as earthquakes, mass extinctions, and
heart attacks.
Recent mathematical thought provides three key

descriptions of how people (and things) get in sync
with one another.
At the heart of the universe is a steady,
insistent beat; the sound of cycles
in sync. —Steven Strogatz
Coupled Oscillators:
Cycles, Order, and Organization
According to Steven Strogatz, author of Sync, cou-
pled oscillation is the starting point for understand-
ing synchronous behavior. Oscillators are dynamic
phenomena that have distinct, repeating cycles; cou-
pled oscillators are those that cycle together. Put half
a dozen pendulum clocks on the same shelf, they
will synchronize over time. Thus, rhythm and com-
munication are basic enablers for synchrony.
A key insight from the mathematics of sync is the
ability to predict the conditions under which groups
of actors will spontaneously synchronize their
behavior. If the group is too diverse, it will not syn-
chronize. Groups that do synchronize are character-
ized by a modified bell curve in which a strong
central peak of actors synchronize around an average
cycle rate and are flanked on either side by two
smaller groups synchronized around slower and
faster cycle rates (see Figure 2).
SYNCHRONY
the process by which patterned behavior is created among
many individuals without conscious control
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE
Figure 2

Partially synchronized groups tend to have
a three-peak distribution
Source: Steven Strogatz. Sync: The Emerging Science of
Spontaneous Order. 2003.
swarm of fireflies
9
Networks:
Emergent Patterns of Interaction
Mathematical insights also tell us about the kinds of
network patterns that are likely to enable the emer-
gence of self-organizing systems. A fundamental pat-
tern here is Albert-Lazlo Barabasi’s scale-free
network, in which most of the nodes will be poorly
connected while a minority will be very highly con-
nected. On first glance, most social networks, as well
as the Internet and World Wide Web, seem to exhibit
this pattern, which is described by a statistical distri-
bution known as the Power Law.
On closer analysis, however, another phenomenon—
the small-world network—may also shape these
emergent systems, based on the extent to which
members share some sort of geographic, organiza-
tional, or social affinity. Small-world networks take
into account existing affiliations and the cost to build
links; Duncan Watts, author of Six Degrees, argues
that, in many complex systems, clusters of strongly
linked nodes can inexpensively extend their reach by
adding a few weak links to other clusters. Small-
world networks may be either scale-free, like
Barabasi’s, or not; in either case, the combination of

strong and weak links can create unexpected and
spontaneous outbreaks of coordinated behavior
across decentralized networks.
Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business
The Research to Date: Seven Lenses on Cooperation
2
KEY PRINCIPLES
• One-to-one coupling tends to grow to
many-to-many coupling.
• Once in sync, systems tend to stay in
sync.
• Disturbances to an equilibrium system
tend to grow as a function of the simi-
larity of players; if they are nearly iden-
tical, disturbances grow exponentially.
• Actors tend to make the minimum
asymmetrical adjustment needed to get
in sync with one another.
• Small differences in connectedness can
lead to very large inequalities over time.
• Power Law distributions are only truly
scale-free when the network is infinite;
in the real world, they exhibit sharp cut-
offs, which means that they are only
scale-free over a portion of their range.
• Random affiliation networks—those in
which members belong to overlapping
groups—will always be small-world
networks.
• Many local affiliations tend to lower

the cost of participating in a global
network.
• Social tools—such as spoken language,
music, and dance—may be ways of cou-
pling human nervous systems remotely,
creating a foundation for collective
action.
10
Flocks and Swarms:
The Rules of Emergence
A third line of mathematical inquiry focuses on the
rules that individual actors follow to create the coop-
erative group behaviors observed in nature, such as
flocking birds or swarming insects. Using agent-
based models, authors like Eric Bonabeau are able to
posit basic rules for systems that mimic an ant
colony’s collective search for food or a beehive’s
management of its waste. Such models are particu-
larly useful for understanding collective intelli-
gence—a lens that we explore in more detail later.
Opportunities for Strategists
• New ways of measuring key indicators. The
mathematics of coupled oscillators, networks,
and swarms provide new ways to measure key
indicators of cooperative behavior (and its out-
comes). For example, some studies have shown
that connectivity of businesses in a geographic
region is an indicator of prosperity.
• Improved planning of networks. Under-
standing the different kinds of network struc-

tures and their effects on synchrony—that is,
on emergent group behavior—can help in
designing and using all kinds of navigation and
communication systems, from self-organizing
sensor networks to organizational structures.
•
Assigning value to social connectivity.
Network mathematics provides a way to ana-
lyze and evaluate the value of social connectiv-
ity of an individual or organization. As we’ll
discover when we look at the catalysis lens, the
new technologies of cooperation include sys-
tems to support affiliate networks and track
their reach both within an organization and out-
side it. Interpreted through network math, this
data could become the basis of auditing indi-
vidual and group cooperative behavior and
even valuing entire companies.
SYNCHRONY
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE
11
Long overlooked in evolutionary theory, symbiosis is
increasingly viewed as a fundamental process in bio-
logical evolution. As such, it is also of crucial inter-
est in understanding the importance and mechanisms
of cooperation in the survival and adaptation of
species under pressure from their environment.
Without invoking biological determinism, studies of
symbiosis can illuminate the rules by which living
beings come to resolve complex survival dilem-

mas—from the cellular level up to the species level.
A leading author in this endeavor has applied game
theory and computer simulation to explore these bio-
logical phenomena. Robert Axelrod, author of The
Evolution of Cooperation, used an iterated Prisoner’s
Dilemma game to track the evolutionary impacts of
cooperative behavior. The result was a computer
strategy, called “Tit for Tat,” that consistently
achieved long-term success in the iterated game by
cooperating on the first move and then mimicking its
partner on subsequent moves.
Reciprocity and Rapid Evolution:
The Biological Argument for Cooperating
Symbiosis has been called “Darwin’s blind spot,”
not because Darwin didn’t recognize it but because
he thought the only significant mechanism of evolu-
tion was general selection through competition and
“survival of the fittest.” Newer studies, however,
suggest that symbiosis is perhaps the major mecha-
nism for rapid adaptation to the environment: at the
cellular level, organisms can literally swap genes,
creating a new species that is a combination of its
symbiotic parents.
At its core, symbiosis is about reciprocity. However,
since symbiosis in nature often occurs between and
among different kinds of organisms, the reciprocity
is not always symmetrical. Parasitism has its place—
perhaps a place of honor—in symbiosis. Tom Ray’s
work with Tierra as an artificial evolution system,
for example, showed that parasites and meta-para-

sites drove evolution more quickly.
Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business
SYMBIOSIS
a mutually beneficial relationship that can
evolve between different organisms in a system
THE WINNING STRATEGY OF
TIT FOR TAT
• Be nice—don’t defect at the first
opportunity
• Retaliate—defect if others do
• Forgive—Switch to cooperation when
your opponent does
• Be clear—Always react in the same way
to your opponent’s behavior
12
Symbiotic Identity:
The Illusive Boundaries of Organisms
As biologists take a closer look, they increasingly
find that organisms are really cooperative colonies,
often of different species. The mitochondria that act
as the energy generators of all cells originated as
parasites that have evolved into a completely inter-
dependent relationship with cells; fueled by the ener-
gy provided by the former symbiont mitochondria,
the cooperative cell colonies known as organisms
have evolved. Similarly, many tree roots depend on
various types of fungus that surround them to trans-
mit nutrients from the soil (and even to exchange
matter with neighboring trees).
These two examples define a range of mutual

dependency from endosymbiotic (in which one
organism is literally inside another) to exosymbiotic
(in which the reciprocating organisms are seemingly
distinct). This continuum, however, points to the dif-
ficulty of identifying clear boundaries of organisms:
it challenges the very notion of the “individual” or
even individual species. Humans, for instance,
wouldn’t exist without billions of symbiotic bacteria
in our digestive systems.
Immune Systems and Infectious Disease:
Symbiosis Gone Awry
Finally, symbiosis also provides insights into the
processes by which cooperation and mutuality may
devolve into a situation where one of the cooperating
organisms suddenly becomes a threat to another.
Bacteria provide an example here: there is evidence
that bacteria have a quorum-sensing mechanism: that
is, they do not attack their host until they sense that
enough of their compatriots are present to overcome
its immune response.
Opportunities for Strategists
• Rapid innovation. Symbiotic relationships can
generate rapid innovation.They allow compa-
nies to create things they couldn’t make on
their own, or while working in more formal
ways with partners. The successful long-term
collaborations between design firms and
manufacturers are great examples of symbiotic
relationships that bring together very different
kinds of companies, and yield ideas and

products that neither party could develop
independently.
• Competitive edge. Symbiosis gives small
companies the ability to compete against large
companies. Small players who are members of
tight webs can pool resources and knowledge,
collaborate, and compete successfully against
larger, more powerful companies.
• Managing living resources. Insights about the
processes of reciprocity and co-evolution can
suggest improved processes—and policies—for
managing biological resources, such as agricul-
tural lands, forests, and fisheries. Quite apart
from cooperative economic strategies (see the
Commons lens for details), understanding the
symbiotic relationships among biological
organisms can lead to better technologies,
practices, and policies.
SYMBIOSIS
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE
13
• Managing disease and bio-threats. As the
world becomes increasingly interconnected, the
potential for devastating epidemics grows.
Understanding the basic patterns and mecha-
nisms of symbiosis and parasitism can provide
both medical and organizational frameworks
for global teams to cooperate in averting disas-
ters and managing outbreaks.
•

Designing industrial ecologies As Hardin
Tibbs has suggested, the economic inefficien-
cies and ecological damage of industrial-era
factories, plants, and physical production sys-
tems can be retuned as cooperative ecologies
in which the by-products and waste-products
of one industry feed the inputs to adjacent
industries.
Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business
The Research to Date: Seven Lenses on Cooperation
2
KEY PRINCIPLES
• Cooperative individuals can survive in
competitive environments by finding
reciprocation partners.
• Successful strategy requires cooperation
with other successful strategies—that is,
if someone else is playing by a successful
set of rules, your strategy is more likely
to succeed if it cooperates with that set
of rules.
• Growing the value of long-term incen-
tives makes short-term defection less
attractive.
• The longer the shadow of the future—
the likelihood that today’s behavior will
effect future actions––the more likely
cooperative behavior is to evolve.
• Symbiosis allows the partnership to be
fitter for a wider range of environmental

conditions than either partner could be
individually.
• Parasitism drives rapid evolution.
KEY PRINCIPLES
14
Cultural evolution theory sheds light on how cooper-
ation can emerge in groups as an observable trait
that is passed through generations—and how it can
shape the meaning of members’ interactions with
one another and across groups. One focus of
research in this area, by authors such as John
Stewart, Yaneer Bar-Yam, Robert Wright, and David
Sloan Wilson, is the role of cooperation in the evolu-
tion of organizations into increasingly complex sys-
tems or social super-organisms. As Wilson states:
“The history of life on earth has been marked by
many transitions from groups of organisms to groups
as organisms. Organismic groups achieve their unity
with mechanisms that suppress selection within
groups without themselves being overtly altruistic.”
Multilevel Selection:
The Survival Value of Cooperation
Group selection declined in acceptance in the late
1960s but has regained interest among current
researchers to frame questions related to cooperation
and organismic life. One of the main challenges to
group selection is the fundamental problem of social
life: groups work best when their members provide
benefits to one another, but many of these prosocial
behaviors do not survive through natural selection.

For example, birds who provide warning calls when
they spot a predator may not gather enough food or
may attract predators and get eaten even though the
flock survives. Selection within the group, then,
would favor those who do not signal for predators (a
non-cooperative behavior).
Darwin shifted the unit of selection from the individ-
ual to the group, and reframed the problem of social
life. He proposed that selection occurs across groups
too. Members of flocks that include birds who give
warning cries as a signal for predators may survive
and reproduce better than groups without signaling
birds, or with fewer signaling birds. Survival of the
group with signalers allows the individual trait of
signaling to be reproduced and passed on. Thus mul-
tilevel selection (selection beyond individual biologi-
cal hereditary to the group level) is an important
dynamic that could explain how cooperative behav-
iors survive and reproduce over time.
• Religion and moral codes as adaptations.
Cooperation can thus be seen as a cultural
adaptation that improves fitness. Using the lens
of multilevel selection, groups evolve into
adaptive units; individuals develop observable
traits that are passed down and may improve
the fitness level of a group within a local envi-
ronment rather than just the fitness of the indi-
vidual. David Sloan Wilson uses this
framework to propose that cooperative
GROUP SELECTION

the process by which groups develop
adaptive traits that improve their fitness in their
environment compared to other groups
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE
15
religious systems act as adaptive organisms.
Moral codes encouraging cooperative behavior
and punishing non-cooperative behavior among
church members are framed as complex adapta-
tions that are finely tuned to specific environ-
ments (as was the Calvinism in Geneva in the
mid-1500s.) Religion is a system that binds
people together to make them fit for their par-
ticular context by cooperating in opposition to
their most selfish desires.
• Pre-adaptation as seeds of the future.
Sometimes adaptations jump contexts and con-
tain the seeds of future cultural evolution some-
place else. Some traits may be pre-adaptive to
future conditions, but we just don’t know it yet.
In The Human Web, McNeill and McNeill
decribe how the adaptation of using human
plow teams to operate heavy moldboard plows
in medieval Europe provided a rich set of coop-
erative practices that helped stimulate early
forms of urban enterprise in medieval towns.
Moldboard plows had a steel blade that could
cut through the muddy European soil, but
required human plow teams rather than a single
ox and driver for operating them. Often these

teams extended beyond family relations and
coordinating them required discipline and inter-
nalized moral codes. That requirement of coop-
eration and trust with people who were not
related, helped prepare townspeople for the
kind of trust and conformity to rules that
helped support transactions and market activi-
ties in burgeoning urban centers.
Executive Control and System
Awareness: Managing Cooperation
The potential benefits of cooperation, as argued by
John Stewart, are an important driver in the evolu-
tion of increasingly complex organisms. Stewart
explains that while groups exploit the benefits of
cooperation among their members, many impedi-
ments—including lack of trust, reputation, and
shared intent—prevent exploitation of the benefits
accross groups.
Managing entities play a key role in enabling across-
group cooperation and the evolution of social super-
organisms by suppressing cheaters and rewarding
cooperators. The organization of molecular process-
es into cells, of cells into multi-cellular organisms,
and humans into human societies are examples of
social organisms in which managing entities play
this role. This process progressively extends cooper-
ation across scales of time and space. The manage-
ment function is a critical evolutionary step in
overcoming the impediments to cooperation at vari-
ous levels in the organization. At its highest level,

management’s awareness of control and coordination
at all levels reaches a sense of organismic identity
and self-consciousness.
Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business
The Research to Date: Seven Lenses on Cooperation
2
moldboard plow
16
Opportunities for Strategists
• Work-group diagnostics. Understanding the
variety of cooperative traits that support the
general fitness of groups could help organiza-
tions develop a set of indicators for successful
groups. These indicators could be used to diag-
nose underperforming groups as well as devel-
op performance indicators at the group level
and the individual level.
• Adaptive organizational codes. Most organi-
zations have codes and cultures that either sup-
port or limit their flexibility in responding to
environmental change. Understanding the prin-
ciples of pre-adaptation—and strategically
identifying pre-adaptive behaviors—could help
organizations implement codes and practices
that make them more adaptive both to change
in general and to specific anticipated innova-
tions in the future.
• New basis for local–global policy. Insights
into multilevel selection and the dynamics of
group selection might enable communities and

organizations to develop better policies for
addressing the local impacts of global coopera-
tion and vice versa. As we reorganize to live in
a globally connected society, the need for such
insights and policies is urgent.
GROUP SELECTION
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE
KEY PRINCIPLES
• Phenotypic traits—those not genetically
determined traits, such as warning cries
or moral standards—are selected at the
group level and are in tune with local
context.
• The invention of technologies that facili-
tate or encourage non-zero-sum interac-
tion is a reliable feature of cultural
evolution.
• Competitive struggles at wider scales
encourage local cooperation.
• Successful strategies often require coop-
eration within the group in order to
compete outside the group.
KEY PRINCIPLES
17
If we think of tools and technology as agents of
human interaction, we immediately see their poten-
tial for catalyzing cooperation. Throughout history,
tools have been a catalyst for increasingly complex
forms of cooperation. Hand-in-hand with agricultural
tools, for example, humans evolved complex irriga-

tion systems that required social organization beyond
small family clans. Writing appeared as a means of
accounting for the exchange of goods, not only cre-
ating markets but also enabling taxation to support
larger systems of governance and defense. Printing
amplified collective intelligence, triggering the
emergence of science as perhaps the largest coopera-
tive enterprise in human history. The global Internet
enabled many-to-many communication, and with it,
peer-to-peer economies and collective action on an
unprecedented global scale.
Unlike some catalysts, however, tools are not
untouched by the reactions they spawn. Rather they
appear to co-evolve with humans. As tools enable
more complex forms of cooperation, people work
together to design and build more complex technolo-
gies of cooperation. At the leading edge of today’s
technology are tools that will amplify, enable, or
tune for cooperation.
Connectivity:
The Infrastructure for Cooperation
Open technical standards for connectivity—such as
TCP/IP, WAP, HTML, and XML—lay the founda-
tion for broad cooperation across organizations, mar-
kets, commercial products, and human activities.
Distributed architectures, enabled by these standards,
catalyze sharing of everything from music to politi-
cal self-organization and computational processing
power. Together they foster a new level of connec-
tivity among humans and their tools; they create a

complex human–machine system embedded with
cooperative processes and procedures. The mobile
telephone, for example, is already in the process of
morphing into a wirelessly networked supercomputer
distributed in a billion pockets worldwide.
Agency and Reputation:
Human–Machine Co-Evolution
At the leading edge of today’s technology are tools
that perform functions previously managed by inti-
mate and often unconscious human behaviors to sup-
port cooperation. For example, nascent reputation
systems such as those in eBay and Slashdot enhance
trust building in distributed markets and publishing,
respectively. Presence-management tools allow peo-
ple to develop more sophisticated and nuanced rules
for interacting over time and distance. At the same
time, a new class of cognitively cooperating devices
will act—either as human agents or as independent
machines—to make cross-organizational decisions
and provide a dynamic, decentralized connectivity
infrastructure.
Such tools extend the human self in time and space
and, at the same time, enmesh it in an ever more
complex human–machine system, perhaps conjuring
the notion of cyborg. While science fiction has gener-
ally scorned the cyborg, Andy Clark argues in
Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business
CATALYSIS
an action or reaction among actors that is triggered by an
outside agent—a very small amount of catalytic agent can

facilitate a very large-scale reaction
gutenberg press
18
Natural Born Cyborgs that humans have been
cyborgs from the earliest days of tool use. Every time
you invoke the mental algorithms you learned for
mathematical calculations and use a pencil and paper
to execute them, you are extending your nervous sys-
tem both conceptually and physically. What is differ-
ent today is the complexity and sophistication with
which humans and their tools cooperate and co-
evolve. (See also the “Collective Intelligence” lens
on page 27.)
Social Software:
The Value of Group-Forming Networks
A measure of the growing capacity of technology to
support cooperative group behavior is the evolution
of communication systems from one-to-one and one-
to-many forms to many-to-many forms. (Recall the
principle from the discussion of “Synchrony” that
one-to-one sync tends to grow to many-to-many
sync.) A new class of social software aims specifical-
ly to facilitate the evolution of group-forming net-
works (GFNs), including network building and
tracking tools.
Measured in economic terms, GFNs demonstrate the
value of cooperative behavior. David Reed, of MIT,
has argued that the value of GFNs grows exponen-
tially, at a rate of 2
N

—where N represents the num-
ber of nodes in the network. Compare this to the
growth rate of one-to-many networks (such as
cable), which grow simply at a rate of N. One-to-one
networks (such as phone) grow at a rate of N
2
(also
known as Metcalf’s Law) (see Figure 3).
The economic value proposition for cooperation is
explored in more detail in our next lens—the
Commons.
CATALYSIS
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE
Value
of network
Number of members
Group-forming
networks
Many-to-one
connection
One-to-one
connection
Figure 3
The value of group-forming networks
greatly exceeds one-to-one and
many-to-one networks
Source: David Reed. That sneaky exponential—beyond Metcalfe’s
Law to the power of community building.
Context
(Spring) 1999.

19
Opportunities for Strategists
• New IT strategies. Technologies of coopera-
tion fundamentally challenge the basic IT
strategies that have dominated organizations
over the last 50 years. Narrow-platform stan-
dards and organizational firewalls are replaced
by inter-operability standards and point-to-
point security. Distributed computation such as
SETI@home or folding@home, mesh network-
ing, grid computing, and ad hoc self-organized
microsensor networks all represent a conver-
gence of microelectronics with cooperation and
collective action.
• Design and use of tools. Understanding the
social and economic value of cooperative
tools—and the design principles that favor
cooperative behavior—can inform the design
and use of all kinds of tools, enhancing not
only their diffusion in the marketplace but also
their ability to serve as machine partners in
solving pressing social problems.
• Bandwidth policy decisions. A key to the
future of both technology and cooperation is
the allocation of radio spectrum. A vibrant
Open Spectrum movement is combining new
technical capabilities with a radical rethinking
of the intellectual property foundations of spec-
trum regulation. (See the “Commons” lens, on
page 20 for details.)

• New human capabilities. As mentioned, tech-
nologies of cooperation extend the social self,
redefining not only the capabilities of individu-
als to act and think together, but also challeng-
ing our basic concepts of ourselves and what it
means to be human. They allow us to partici-
pate consciously in our own evolution.
Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business
The Research to Date: Seven Lenses on Cooperation
2
KEY PRINCIPLES
• Media innovations that enable humans
to communicate in new ways, at new
paces, and among larger and more
selective groups tend to spawn new
forms of collective action.
• Reputation is the lubricant that makes
large-scale cooperation among
strangers possible.
• Automated collaborative-filtering sys-
tems (such as Amazon’s recommenda-
tion system) work best when there is a
low risk of making a bad decision; as
the risk increases, so does the need for
sophisticated reputation systems.
• Group-forming networks grow
exponentially.
• Larger scale networks tend to support
new categories of cooperation and
competition.

• With mesh networks, the effectiveness
of the network increases as the number
of users or nodes increase.
• Cognitively cooperating devices elimi-
nate the need for a central connectivity
infrastructure by serving as an infra-
structure for each other.
KEY PRINCIPLES
20
In 1968, Garrett Hardin published his now-famous
paper in the journal Science, entitled “The Tragedy
of the Commons.” The paper described a particular
form of social dilemma that arises when goods and
resources are owned in common and there is no easy
way to punish overconsumers or undercontributors—
a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma form. Hardin argued
that the commons would inevitably be plundered by
over-consumption and failure to replenish. From the
perspective of economists, the fate of the commons
is thus a key focal point for cooperative studies.
An important driver in a number of recent studies
has been evolution of technology, which has created
a number of new commons and a host of behaviors
that don’t seem to follow classic economic laws—or
accommodate conventional business models. The
result has been new insights into alternative forms of
property ownership and management, commons-
based production practices, and even new theories of
economic behavior.
Property Regimes and Payoff Structures:

The Creation of Wealth
The commons is one of several property regimes that
are defined by Peter Kollock in terms of two dimen-
sions: the extent to which a resource’s use is restrict-
ed (excludability) and the extent to which one
person’s use subtracts from another’s use (rivalrous-
ness). (See “Resources” on page 37 for a detailed
discussion of these dimensions and their associated
property regimes.) Each of these regimes has unique
payoff structures; each can, in a different way, be the
source of wealth creation. The common-pool
resource is particularly important from the perspec-
tive of cooperation, however, because it represents a
social dilemma whose solution could open vast new
opportunities for innovation and creation of wealth.
It is the most promising source of sustainable eco-
nomic growth in the coming decades.
THE COMMONS
goods, resources, or property owned by no one
but available for use by everyone
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE